Protesters March as New Hong Kong Leader Is Sworn In

Pro-democracy demonstrators marched in Hong Kong on Sunday after Leung Chun-ying was sworn in as chief executive.Credit
Carlos Barria/Reuters

HONG KONG — Huge crowds of protesters thronged the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday afternoon, hours after President Hu Jintao of China swore in a new chief executive and cabinet for the territory.

Surging down broad avenues between high-rises in a central shopping district, the protesters marched toward two government office complexes carrying a variety of banners. A wide range of causes were represented, including greater democracy in Hong Kong and calls for better state pensions and day care.

But the most common theme was derision toward Hong Kong’s new chief executive, Leung Chun-ying. Democracy activists contend that he is “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” whose sympathies for the Chinese Communist Party may lead him to roll back some of the city’s cherished civil liberties — although Mr. Leung has denied that.

“We worry that as he becomes our leader, he will betray our freedoms and civil rights,” said Juno Wu, 24, a librarian.

The Hong Kong government issued a statement on Sunday evening saying that it would protect civil liberties.

“The government will uphold the core values of Hong Kong and protect the freedom and rights of the people,” the statement said. “The chief executive and his team will honor their pledge to hold themselves accountable to the people.”

People streamed out of Victoria Park, where the protest began, and into the march for more than four hours, making it one of the largest political protests in Hong Kong in the past decade — or even anywhere in China, since protests are banned on the mainland.

The Hong Kong police said that the number of people in the park at the beginning of the march had been 55,000. Organizers said that 400,000 people had participated in the march, including many who joined along the nearly two-mile route.

Ivan Choy, a Hong Kong politics analyst at Chinese University of Hong Kong, said that the crowd’s size relative to Hong Kong’s population of seven million would make it harder for Mr. Leung to preserve his political legitimacy. “We have 5 percent of the population asking him to step down and focusing on his integrity,” Mr. Choy said.

Photo

Leung Chun-ying, at left behind the lectern, Hong Kong's new chief executive, was sworn in by Hu Jintao, the Chinese president.Credit
Jerome Favre/Bloomberg News

The protest took place after Mr. Hu had already flown out of Hong Kong at midday, following the inauguration ceremony.

An unexpected element of the demonstration that may discomfit Beijing officials lay in the participation of hundreds of mainland Chinese who carried banners denouncing the confiscation of their farms for government-backed real estate projects in communities near Hong Kong.

“It is not possible to protest in China, so we come here instead,” said a middle-aged mainlander who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid government retaliation.

Mainland Chinese have frequently attended vigils and other protests here, but usually at night. It is unusual for them to carry large banners through the streets in broad daylight.

Earlier, Mr. Leung’s swearing-in ceremony was briefly disrupted when one of the 2,300 guests began shouting during Mr. Hu’s speech. An unidentified man asked Mr. Hu to end one-party rule in mainland China and to remember June 4, a reference to the date of the military crackdown in 1989 on protesters at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Security guards quickly escorted the man out of the room.

Mr. Hu promised the audience that Beijing would uphold the “one country, two systems” model in place since 1997, when Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty; the move came after British and Chinese leaders promised considerable autonomy to the city until at least 2047.

As he took office, Mr. Leung did not speak in Cantonese, the Chinese dialect prevalent in Hong Kong, and instead used Mandarin, the dominant dialect on the mainland, to say his government would immediately begin to confront the array of social issues. In June, the Hong Kong government said the divide between rich and poor, already the greatest in any economy in Asia, had reached its widest mark since the beginning of record-keeping in 1971.

Iris Wong, a 26-year-old Hong Kong resident, said the issues facing the city were interlinked.

“There isn’t one issue I’m concerned about more than others,” she said. “They’re all connected. If we had democracy and a political system that was not dominated by a few wealthy people, we could begin to address economic problems.”

When Mr. Leung entered the election campaign last fall, he was widely seen as an underdog. His rival, Henry Tang, the scion of a wealthy manufacturing family originally from Shanghai, had strong support from the influential Shanghai faction in mainland Chinese politics.

But Mr. Tang’s candidacy imploded in a series of setbacks, notably the disclosure early this year that an extensive basement had been built under his wife’s house without planning permission from the government or the payment of real estate taxes and fees. So it came as a surprise a week ago when it turned out that Mr. Leung had six illegal structures at his home — valued at 500 million Hong Kong dollars, or $64 million — in one of Hong Kong’s most prestigious neighborhoods.

Mr. Leung, one of the city’s most successful real estate surveyors, has publicly apologized. He said that four of the structures were already there when he bought the house in 2000 and that he did not realize the other two, a glass canopy and a trellis, were illegal.

Hilda Wang and Jacob Fromer contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on July 2, 2012, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Hong Kong Sees Protest As Leader Is Sworn In. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe